[pool] how to move to Java8?

Hi folks!
I've worked through the open POOL tickets and found a few tickets which would like to enhance a few of our interfaces.
E.g. in POOL-355 we have a request to add a new method getMaxNumActive() to the ObjectPool interface.
Now this would of course be a backward compatibility breaking change. If we would have java8 as minimum then we could easily just add a default method which returns -1. But since our min Java version is 1.7 we are doomed...
I would love to get the deadlock fixes out with the current 1.7 requirement first. Because that's important to get to the people (including my own customers).
But what after that?Would this justify a commons-pool-3.0?Do we also like to cleanup other stuff? Or should we just raise our min Java requirement to 1.8 and call it 2.7?
I'm totally fine either way and would love to get any feedback.
LieGrue,strub